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When all the chests were out and the three man-beasts were standing around them with their weapons at the ready, I shouted. The wounded troopers lashed every destrier in the new team, the Ascians heaved until their eyes started from their straining faces ... and just when we all thought it would not, the steel coach lifted itself from the mud and lumbered half a chain before the wounded could bring it to a halt. Guasacht nearly got us both killed by ru
He got a great deal more excited when he saw the manbeasts carry their gold inside again, and when he heard what I had promised the Ascians. I reminded him that he had given me leave to act in his name.
“When I act,” he sputtered, “it’s with the idea of wi
I confessed I lacked his military experience, but told him I had found that in some situations wi
“Just the same, I had hoped you would work out something better.”
Rising inexorably while we remained unaware of their motion, the mountain peaks to the west were already clawing for the lower edge of the sun; I pointed to it.
Suddenly, Guasacht smiled. “After all, these are the same Ascians we took it from before.”
He called the Ascian officer over and told him our mounted troopers would lead the attack, and that his soldiers could follow the steel coach on foot. The Ascian agreed, but when his soldiers had rearmed themselves, he insisted on placing half a dozen on top of the coach and leading the attack himself with the rest. Guasacht agreed with an apparent bad grace that seemed to me entirely assumed. We put an armed trooper astride each of the eight-destriers of the new team, and I saw Guasacht conversing earnestly with their cornet.
I had promised the Ascian we would break through the cordon of deserters to the north, but the ground in that direction proved to be unsuited to the steel coach, and in the end a route north by northwest was agreed upon. The Ascian infantry advanced at a pace not much short of a full run, firing as they came. The coach followed. The narrow, enduring bolts of the troopers’ conti stabbed at the ragged mob who tried to close about it, and the Ascian arquebuses on its roof sent gouts of violet energy crashing among them. The man-beasts fired their fusils from the barred windows, slaughtering half a dozen with a single blast.
The remainder of our troops (I among them) followed the coach, having maintained our perimeter until it was gone. To save precious charges, many put their conti through the saddle rings, drew their swords, and rode down the straggling remnant the Ascians and the coach had left behind.
Then the enemy was past, and the ground clearer. At once the troopers whose mounts pulled the coach dapped spurs to them, and Guasacht, Erblon, and several others who were riding just behind it swept the Ascians from its top in a cloud of crimson flame and reeking smoke. Those on foot scattered, then turned to fire.
It was a fight I did not feel I could take part in. I reined up, and so saw—I believe, before any of the others—the first of the anpiels who dropped, like the angel in Melito’s fable, from the sun-dyed clouds.
They were fair to look upon, naked and having the slender bodies of young women; but their rainbow wings spread wider than any teratornis’s, and each anpiel held a pistol in either hand. Late that night, when we were back in camp and the wounded had been cared for, I asked Guasacht if he would do as he had again.
He thought for a moment. “I hadn’t any way of knowing those flying girls would come. Looking at it from this end, it’s natural enough—there must have been enough in that coach to pay half the army, and they wouldn’t hesitate to send elite troops looking for it. But before it happened, would you have guessed it?”
I shook my head.
“Listen, Severian, I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. But you did what you could, and you’re the best leech I ever saw. Anyway, it came out all right in the end, didn’t it? You saw how friendly their seraph was. What did she see, after all? Plucky lads trying to save the coach from the Ascians. We’ll get a commendation, I should think. Maybe a reward.”
I said, “You could have killed the man-beasts, and the Ascians too, when the gold was out of the coach. You didn’t because I would have died with them. I think you deserve a commendation. From me, at least.”
He rubbed his drawn face with both hands. “Well, I’m just as happy. It would have been the end of the Eighteenth; in another watch we’d have been killing each other for the money.”
XXI. Deployment
BEFORE THE BATTLE there were other patrols and days of idleness. Often enough we saw no Ascians, or saw only their dead. We were supposed to arrest deserters and drive from our area such peddlers and vagabonds as fatten on an army; but if they seemed to us such people as had surrounded the steel coach, we killed them, not executing them in any formal style but cutting them down from the saddle.
The moon waxed again nearly to the full, hanging like a green apple in the sky. Experienced troopers told me the worst fights always came at or near the full of the moon, which is said to breed madness. I suppose this is actually because its refulgence permits generals to bring up reinforcements by night.
On the day of the battle, the graisle’s bray summoned us from our blankets at dawn. We formed a ragged double column in the mist, with Guasacht at our head and Erblon following him with our flag. I had supposed that the women would stay behind—as most had when we had gone on patrolbut more than half drew conti and came with us. Those who had helmets, I noticed, thrust their hair up into the bowl, and many wore corslets that flattened and concealed their breasts. I mentioned it to Mesrop, who rode opposite me.
“There might be trouble about the pay,’ he said. “Somebody with sharp eyes will be counting us, and the contracts usually call for men.”
“Guasacht said there’d be more money today,’ I reminded him.
He cleared his throat and spat, the white phlegm vanishing into the clammy air as though Urth herself had swallowed it.
“They won’t pay until it’s over. They never do.”
Guasacht shouted and waved an arm; Erblon gestured with our flag, and we were off, the hoofbeats sounding like the thudding of a hundred muffled drums. I said, “I suppose that way they don’t have to pay for those who are killed.”
“They pay triple-once because he fought, once for blood money, and once for discharge money.”
“Or she fought, I suppose.” Mesrop spat again.
We rode for some time, then halted at a spot that seemed no different from any other. As the column fell silent, I heard a humming or murmuring in the hills all around us. A scattered army, dispersed no doubt for sanitary reasons and to deprive the Ascian enemy of a concentrated target, was assembling now just as particles of dust in the stone town had come together in the bodies of its resuscitated dancers.
Not u
Another that we had not seen came leaping across our path, hardly higher than the treetops. Each spoke was the length of a tower, pierced with casements and ports. Though it lay flat upon the air, it seemed to stride along. Its wind whistled down upon us as if to blow away the trees. My piebald screamed and bolted, and so did many other destriers, often falling in that strange wind.